Vivienne Westwood Quotes

I always look at everyone when we're on the street and think, 'We're like sheep or ants.'

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Politics is a herd mentality. Politicians don't really lead. Politicians reflect what they think is consensus opinion.

We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

O imitators, you slavish herd!